Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892-1964

The first modern Irish playwrights emerged in London in the 1890s, at the intersection of a rising international socialist movement and a new campaign for gender equality and sexual freedom. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions shows how Irish playwrights mediated between the sexual and the socialist revolutions, and traces their impact on left theatre in Europe and America from the 1890s to the 1960s. Drawing on original archival research, the study reconstructs the engagement of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett with socialists and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht, and Lorraine Hansberry.

• Argues for and models a way of reconciling Marxist politics with identity politics, instead of privileging one over the other
• Offers the first sustained investigation of Irish drama’s engagement with left culture in Europe and North America
• Offers fresh readings of canonical plays by major authors while elaborating a new and generative argument about Ireland’s contribution to modern drama and literary modernism
• Uses hard-to-find archival sources to recover and reinterpret crucial but forgotten and/or misunderstood moments in theater history and in the history of the cultural left
• Brings Marxist and feminist/queer theoretical concerns together to produce a nuanced and revealing account of the interaction between sexual and social politics in the first half of the twentieth century